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Email a FriendPosted by Amanda on Tuesday, Apr 20, 2010 12:27 PM (EDT):
Thank you so much for this, Rebecca.
With Youth In Malta
the second of two moving scenes
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 12:00 PM
As promised, here is the second moment from the Pope’s Malta pilgrimage that touched my heart.
In his meeting with young people in Malta, the pope took questions before he himself spoke.
I haven’t found a full transcript yet, but I love the first question because it is brave and honest.
It’s not coming from a pious kid who adores the Pope, but from a kid who is in some way not revealed more broken. Perhaps he suffers from same-sex attraction.
At any rate, there is a lot to learn from his question for those of us who hope to spread the faith. A reporter notes it in her blog. It’s longish, but I’m going to quote it in full anyway because it’s powerful:
I wish to speak on behalf of those young people who, like me feel they are on the outskirts of the Church. We are the ones who do not fit comfortably into stereo-typed roles. This is due to various factors among them: either because we have experienced substance abuse; or because we are experiencing the misfortune of broken or dysfunctional families; or because we are of a different sexual orientation; among us are also our immigrant brothers and sisters, all of us in some way or another have encountered experiences that have estranged us from the Church. Other Catholics put us all in one basket. For them we are those “who claim to believe yet do not live up to the commitment of faith.”
To us, faith is a confusing reality and this causes us great suffering. We feel that not even the Church herself recognizes our worth. One of our deepest wounds stems from the fact that although the political forces are prepared to realize our desire for integration, the Church community still considers us to be a problem. It seems almost as if we are less readily accepted and treated with dignity by the Christian community than we are by all other members of society.
We understand that our way of life puts the Church in an ambiguous position, yet we feel that we should be treated with more compassion – without being judged and with more love.
We are made to feel that we are living in error. This lack of comprehension on the part of other Christians causes us to entertain grave doubts, not only with regards to community life, but also regarding our personal relationship with God. How can we believe that God accepts us unconditionally when his own people reject us?
Your Holiness, we wish to tell you that on a personal level – and some of us, even in our respective communities – are persevering to find ways in which we may remain united in Jesus, who we consider to be our salvation.
However, it is not that easy for us to proclaim God as our Father, a God who responds to all those who love him without prejudice. It is a contradiction in terms when we bless God’s Holy Name, whilst those around us make us feel that we are worth nothing to him.
We feel emarginated, almost as if we had not been invited to the banquet. God has called to him all those who are in the squares and in the towns, those who are on the wayside and in the country side, however we feel he has bypassed our streets. Your Holiness, please tell us what exactly is Jesus’ call for us. We wish you to show to us and the rest of the Church just how valid is our faith, and whether our prayers are also heard. We too wish to give our contribution to the Catholic community.
Your Holiness, what must we do?
I feel like I want to hug that kid for having the guts to stand before the Pope and admit his (or her, I am making an assumption) struggles with faith publicly, because he speaks for half the people of the Western world. He finds he can’t live the Christian life fully. He feels his fellow-Christians are cold and unwelcoming. And yet he longs to be a Christian and to enter into the community of love and justice—he just can’t find his way in.
And here is the Pope’s answer, which is vintage Benedict. It’s well worth reading in full, but here are just a few paragraphs.
Every personal encounter with Jesus is an overwhelming experience of love. Previously, as Paul himself admits, he had “persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it” (Gal 1:13). But the hatred and anger expressed in those words was completely swept away by the power of Christ’s love. For the rest of his life, Paul had a burning desire to carry the news of that love to the ends of the earth.
Maybe some of you will say to me, Saint Paul is often severe in his writings. How can I say that he was spreading a message of love? My answer is this. God loves every one of us with a depth and intensity that we can hardly begin to imagine. And he knows us intimately, he knows all our strengths and all our faults. Because he loves us so much, he wants to purify us of our faults and build up our virtues so that we can have life in abundance. When he challenges us because something in our lives is displeasing to him, he is not rejecting us, but he is asking us to change and become more perfect. That is what he asked of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. God rejects no one. And the Church rejects no one. Yet in his great love, God challenges all of us to change and to become more perfect.
Maybe I am reading too much of my own story into this young man’s question, but I identify with it completely because I’m one of those people who lost her faith in adolescence.
I didn’t have any great struggle against Christian morality, but I simply didn’t see any Christians around me. Or rather, as I was raised an evangelical and attended an evangelical grammar school, I was deeply troubled by the hypocrisy I saw every day. We started the morning with prayers and praise of Jesus and then went right into full gossip and wound mode. And many of the teachers appeared to me to be less serious about life than my Jewish father whom they breezily consigned to hell.
Let that not be taken for an anti-evangelical rant. I’m sure I would have had the same experience in any faith community. In retrospect I see that my adolescent self simply couldn’t accept the human condition, so if I saw any flaw or weakness at all, I assumed the person’s faith wasn’t sincere. Everyone was either an angel or a demon, and as I found no angels, I lost hope.
I think all Christians disappoint the world in that sense. No one can fail to be attracted by the message of love and salvation. But after initial attraction, when people really get to know us, they find that we are not angels, but men, and still very capable of cowardice, slander, stupidity and worse. Even among those truly advanced in holiness, there are still imperfections which can be off-putting. Union with God doesn’t save you from being politically foolish, saccharine, brusque, or flat-out wrong about all kinds of contingent matters.
I think that’s part of why the world is so angry about past cases of clerical sexual abuse even as it ignores and even promotes (through Planned Parenthood, for example, and a culture that sexualizes young children—walked through a girls’ dept. lately?) current cases of sexual abuse. It doesn’t believe, but deep down it wants to, so when Christians fail so utterly to be what they’re called to be, it wounds at a level deeper than even our critics understand.
Which is why the Pope keeps repeating to Christians that morality cannot be the chief weapon of evangelization. We ourselves are incapable without grace of living up to morality (“without me you can do nothing” is the teaching of Christ’s that resonates more and more with me as I age and learn what is out of my control). And the faith is not about rules. It is about an encounter with Jesus. When we meet Him, our lives are transformed, and then we can walk together on the path towards the Father. Not as angels modeling perfection for others, but as sinners who are trying together to get better, and who run as often as necessary to his forgiveness.
Comments
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So Beautiful! I just wish the one big broken communication piece would get worked on:
The youth did not say he was at fault (in a state of sin) but was rejected for ‘who’ he was. That is the case for many immigrants, and those with a different gender identity or any big difference.
Our Pope’s words explain the need to correct faults and grow in virtue but not how to maintain hope when your very person is rejected.
Especially with youth who have same sex attraction its important to keep them part of the church and learning God’s love long enough to lean on Him for strength. Only then can they consider the hard long life of chastity they may are called to.
I’ve met so many of these young people recently and some are so heartbroken. I really hope as Church we can reach out to them.
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